Archive

Quotes

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

—Quintus Fabius Maximus, c. 203 BC

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811